From: d.nix <d.nix@comcast.net> To: cypherpunks@cpunks.org; liberationtech@mailman.stanford.edu Sent: Thursday, October 3, 2013 9:11 AM Subject: Re: USB Block Erupters as RNG sources?

"Very little", and "no".  They're basically custom Bitcoin-mining ASICs, I looked at one a while back for use in password-cracking

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and they're really not suited for it at all, you load a vector in and say "go" but since they're quite I/O-limited you can't easily adapt them for hash-breaking.  As for RNG use, they're entirely deterministic, how would you use them as an RNG source?

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at best you *might* be able twist it into a DRBG that would still need to be seeded (and regularly reseeded) with robust entropy.

these ASICs really are single purpose; they're useless for anything else.

Thanks Peter, Coderman- Kinda what I suspected seeing as they are *Application Specific* IC's after all... Wishful thinking more than anything knowing that they are now saturating their market and loosing value rapidly. Cheers! DN

This looks like a decent idea for a RNG.          http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1434841111001713       Another is:   http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=847868&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F81%2F18417%2F00847868 Yet another:   http://www.fdk.co.jp/cyber-e/pi_ic_rpg100.html       Jim Bell